Obama's Honeymoon Interruptus

Obama’s Honeymoon Interruptus

After 34 years on NBC, the people at “Saturday Night Live” have come to believe their political skits carry a significant amount of weight. And they’re absolutely correct.

Whether it should be so or not, whether comedians should have the power to mold and sway political opinion, SNL has had millions of faithful viewers since 1974 who take its jokes very seriously.

Presidents Nixon and Ford took their satiric lumps before they left the stage and President Carter can attest to the fact that being skewered on SNL can be politically painful. That was during the early days, the time when the show’s “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” were, usually, more funny than caustic.

Presidents Reagan and Bush I also weren’t manhandled too badly and Bill “Teflon-Man” Clinton was virtually impervious.

See here for brief clips of those presidents being SNL-ed: http://bit.ly/4lRYvp

The gloves were off during GWB’s 8 years and he was regularly pilloried and abused on “SNL,” though not suffering any great harm since he was so regularly pilloried and abused by the mainstream media that it didn’t make much difference.

Barack Obama is a whole other story. (I’d say a horse of a different color but that could be misinterpreted.) Candidate Obama fit perfectly with “SNL’s” demographic–young, liberal, and impertinent, and he wasn’t very caricature-able.

That was then, this is now.

The first now moment struck in October . . .

(Read the rest at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1341)